


Splinters

by doctorkaitlyn



Series: tumblr fics & ficlets, part ii. [38]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural (TV) Fusion, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Complicated Relationships, Established Relationship, F/F, Getting Back Together, Hunter Allison, Hunter Lydia Martin, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-29
Updated: 2018-05-29
Packaged: 2019-05-15 18:37:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14795810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorkaitlyn/pseuds/doctorkaitlyn
Summary: In a small town somewhere near the middle of the vast flatness of Kansas, they split up.Then again,split upalmost makes it sound amicable. Splitting up is what happens when a couple married for twenty-five years realizes that they simply don’t love each other anymore, that perhaps they haven’t loved each other for years.Really, it’s not so much that they split up that they splinter apart under the weight of too many days and months and years spent side by side in dreary, faded motel rooms, under the weight of too many barbed remarks and too many nights where sleep took a back seat to stitches and barely contained paranoia.





	Splinters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aweekofsaturdays](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aweekofsaturdays/gifts).



> this was written for the prompt "Allison/Lydia + I’m better when I’m with you + supernatural hunter au!" technically, this could be read as a prequel to [this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12832371) Allison/Cora/Lydia fic I wrote awhile back, but it also stands on its own. 
> 
> let me know if i've forgotten any tags for this one.

In a small town somewhere near the middle of the vast flatness of Kansas, they split up.

Then again, _split up_ almost makes it sound amicable. Splitting up is what happens when a couple married for twenty-five years realizes that they simply don’t love each other anymore, that perhaps they haven’t loved each other for years.

Really, it’s not so much that they split up that they splinter apart under the weight of too many days and months and years spent side by side in dreary, faded motel rooms, under the weight of too many barbed remarks and too many nights where sleep took a back seat to stitches and barely contained paranoia.

(Does it still count as paranoia if you know the truth about what’s lingering in the dark, if you’ve felt its hot breath on your face?)

There’s no dramatic exit, no freeze-frame moment that Lydia will recall for the rest of her life. She simply wakes up to the sun filtering through curtains nearly translucent with age to discover that Allison is gone. She’s covered her tracks; the only sign that she was there in the first place is a note stuck to the mirror in the bathroom, scrawled in dying pen on a page ripped from the battered Bible in the bedside drawer.

_I’m sorry._

Lydia holds the thin piece of paper gingerly between her fingers for a few moments, stares at the words scrawled across scripture. Briefly, she allows herself to wonder when Allison wrote the note, if she did it in secret while Lydia showered off grime and blood, the hallmarks of a successful hunt, if she let the note burn a hole in her pocket until Lydia fell asleep. She wonders if Allison did it at the last moment, if she already had her duffel bag packed and thrown over one bruised shoulder, if her scabbed fingers were hovering over the doorknob, before she decided to say goodbye after all.

Before those thoughts can expand in the depths of her mind like an inflating balloon, Lydia drops the note into the sink and turns the water on, leaves the tap running while she brushes her teeth and washes her face.

By the time she finishes, the note is nothing more than shapeless pulp clogging the drain.

When she steps outside into the crisp air of a Midwestern spring morning, she’s surprised to see that Allison left the car behind. She’s taken her spare bag of clothes from the back, and some of their stakes and guns are missing, but the car remains, nosed up snugly to the concrete parking space divider.

Lydia leaves it there, for the time being, and walks down the street to the diner they sat in yesterday morning, sits at the same table where they spread their research notes out and discussed strategy while eating bland pancakes and slightly burned toast.

She eats in silence and returns to a motel room that remains empty.

There’s nothing keeping her in town any longer; the nest of vampires that they came to eradicate has been turned into dust that she’s long since picked out from underneath her fingernails. All it would take is ten minutes of searching on the internet or a single strategically placed phone call to discover the next hunt.

But she waits.

She gives Allison two days of buffer, two days to change her mind. After all, they’ve walked away from each other before, more times than she can count, but it’s never been for long, never for more than a few hours. Usually, hustling a few people at pool at a bar on the town line or spending some time in the outdated, musty stacks of a library is enough, provides enough space for them to lick their respective wounds before they come back together again.

But forty-eight hours pass, and Lydia’s boredom increases exponentially, and Allison doesn’t reappear.

So, on the morning of the third day, which dawns with a faded kind of sunlight that promises another unseasonably cool day, Lydia makes the bed, swipes the car keys off the peeling laminate tabletop, and decides that two can play at that game.

She leaves.

She drives.

She finds a new hunt.

She leaves another small town a little safer than she found it, leaves with bruises riddling her arms and stubborn blood still lingering in the folds of her knuckles. 

She drives some more.

The tarmac fades together into an endless series of potholes and faded yellow lines. The days fade together just the same. Whether she wakes up in Wyoming, Missouri, Wisconsin, Virginia, whether she leaves town with vampire blood or wendigo flesh or werewolf fur clinging to her clothes, the days lose all sense of individualism.

Even the names of those she saves, the names of those who thank her tearfully for avenging the death of their

( _sister aunt brother father friend boyfriend fiancé partner cousin_ )

loved ones start to blend together.

She is always bone-tired, and she always dreams of Allison, and monotony becomes the new normal.

It’s not exactly the life she envisioned when she first exorcised a demon and realized it was the only thing she wanted to do for the rest of her days.

&.

She’s in Tennessee when she comes so close to dying that she nearly tastes it upon her tongue.

It’s a singular moment of lost concentration, a single moment where she loses her focus, but it’s long enough for the last of her targets (wholly and utterly human this time, just four members of a family engulfed in murderous madness in the depths of the woods) to slice open her femoral artery with a rusty knife. In the time it takes her to blink, with a scream equal parts triumph and anger and pain, she shoots him through the head, and he collapses to the muddy ground like a demolished building.

But, just as the blood leaks from the hole in the back of his skull and soaks into the earth, so does the blood leak from the inside of her leg and soak into her trousers.

She works as fast as she can, cuts open the leg of her pants and peels it away from the wound, yanks her belt off. By the time she pulls it tight around her thigh as a tourniquet, her vision has doubled, and her head feels barely attached to her shoulders, like a decapitation not quite completed. The car is only a few yards away, but as she crawls across the pitted ground, fingers clawing up clumps of crabgrass and dirt, the car’s outline wavers, disappears entirely, flickers unsteadily like an old film.

Eventually, just before her hand brushes the rubber of the front tire, the whole world disappears entirely.

When it swims back into comprehension, the blackness of night has given away to the sterile, painful brightness of a hospital room. She’s in clean, ill-fitting clothes, there’s painkiller fuzz floating across her eyes and filling her brain, and one of her wrists is handcuffed to the metal bed frame.

She uses a bobby pin from her hair to pick the lock, slips past security and doctors, and successfully poses as a state detective in order to get her car out of impound at the local sheriff’s station. She drives until Tennessee is in the rear view, until the pain in her leg is so spectacular that she’s nearly blind with it. Only then does she pull over at a truck stop and pop two pills from the bottom of a stash that desperately needs replenishing.

She doesn’t dream. She simply sleeps.

When she eventually returns to the land of the living, spine cramped from curling up in the back seat, leg throbbing in time to the rhythm of her heart, it’s to the tinny ringing of one of her burner phones in the glove compartment.

This phone hasn’t rang in months. There’s only two people who have the number.

She hauls herself into the front seat and slaps the compartment open, and a ripple of pain courses through her leg. When she flips the phone open, she doesn’t recognize the number, but she recognizes all too well the sound of the breathing on the other end of the line, recognizes it from the thousands of nights where she fell asleep to its particular rhythm.

“I’m better when I’m with you,” Allison says, and perhaps it’s from the pain clouding her mind, but Lydia thinks Allison’s voice sounds raspy, unpracticed.

Maybe she isn’t the only one whose days blended together.

“Me too,” Lydia replies, utterly and truthfully. The wound on her leg aches and twinges. “Where are you?”

Allison laughs, and the sound is like a beer bottle smashing on a floor or across someone’s head, both bitter and beautiful at once.

“Don’t worry. I’ll come to you.”

And she does.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, I can be found on [tumblr.](http://banshee-cheekbones.tumblr.com/) :)


End file.
